Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

June 12, 2011 Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, Eating Money Could there have been a pickier eater in 1950s America than me?  I doubt it.  Among the many things I wouldn’t eat was spaghetti and meatballs.  (Gross!)  Or at least I refused until one summer on return from camp, I told my astonished parents that I loved the stuff, just not the kind they served.  There was only one brand for me: Franco-American Spaghetti. For those of you who aren’t old enough to remember that Campbell’s brand or the singing ad line that went with it (“Who can? Franco-Ameri-can...”), it was spaghetti that came out of a can, usually with a thwuck and as a single cylindrical lump of Day-Glo reddish-orange goo (thanks undoubtedly to some since-banned red dye or other).  It practically screamed: don’t touch me if you value your life.  And of course I couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Today, in my hometown, as in so many places in this country, there are two semi-competitive strands of food.  Representative of the far smaller of the two -- the spreading local foods movement -- is the modest-sized farmer’s market that opens every Friday morning in our neighborhood, like so many scattered around the Big Apple, and has put fresh fish, organic turkey breasts, and loads of green vegetables (root vegetables in winter) into urban diets like mine. Representative of the second strand are the corporate food labs that dedicate themselves to producing edible products carefully calibrated to the Franco-American weaknesses in us all, “combinations of fat, sugar, and salt that are so tasty many people cannot stop eating them” even when full; that, in the phrase of former Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler, take us to “the bliss point.” ("The right combination of tastes triggers a greater number of neurons, getting them to fire more. The message to eat becomes stronger, motivating the eater to look for even more food.”)  You know that addictive feeling when you begin munching on that first whatever and just can’t say no, when your body, once started, just doesn’t know how to stop. My bet is that you can get your fill of both strands in the summer “Food” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, which, four times a year, brilliantly unites some of the most provocative and original voices in history around a single topic. (You can subscribe to it by clicking here.) TomDispatch thanks the editors of that elegant journal for allowing us to preview Lapham's elegant little history of the American stomach.  Tom The Midas Touch Stomachs Too Big to Fail? By Lewis H. Lapham [A longer version of this essay appears in "Food," the Summer 2011 issue of Lapham's Quarterly and is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.] Jesus answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” -- The Gospel According to Matthew It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears. -- Cato the Elder In both the periodical and tabloid press these days, the discussion tends to dwell on the bread alone -- its scarcity or abundance, its price, provenance, authenticity, presentation, calorie count, social status, political agenda, and carbon footprint. The celebrity guest on camera with Rachael Ray or an Iron Chef, the missing ingredient in the recipes for five-star environmental collapse. Either way, sous vide or sans tout, the preoccupation with food is front-page news, but in preparing for the current food issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, I’ve learned that my acquaintance with the backstory was well behind the headlines. My ignorance I attribute to a coming of age in the America of the late 1940s, its cows grazing on grass, the citizenry fed by farmers growing unpatented crops. Accustomed to the restrictions imposed on the country’s appetite by the Second World War’s ration books, and raised in a Protestant household that didn’t give much thought to fine dining (one ate to live, one didn’t live to eat), I acquired a laissez-faire attitude toward food that, I learn from Michael Pollan, resembles that of the Australian koala. The koala contents itself with the eating of eucalyptus leaves, choosing to ignore whatever else shows up in or around its tree. Similarly, the few primitive tastes met with before my 10th birthday -- peanut butter and jelly, creamed chicken and rice, the Fig Newton -- have remained securely in place for the last 66 years, faith-based and conservative, apt to be viewed with suspicion at trendsetting New York restaurants, in one of which last winter my asking about the chance of seeing a baked or mashed potato prompted the waiter to remove the menu from my hand, gently but firmly retrieving the pearl from a swine. Click here to read more of this dispatch.